The recent turn to the ‘anni di piombo’ in Italian film that has been marked by films such as Buongiorno, notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003), La meglio gioventù (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003), Mio fratello è figlio unico (Daniele Luchetti, 2007) and La prima linea (Renato De Maria, 2009) has triggered a series of interesting discussions about the nature of cultural memory, and the representation of national trauma.1 Despite the self-evident similarities in terms of cast members, directors and aesthetic styles, scholarship on organized crime film has been extremely hesitant in pushing these films into the same debates. To give some examples: Fabio Vighi has offered challenging analyses of films such as I cento passi (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2000) in terms of its rendering of traumatic loss as Lacanian jouissance, thus taking trauma out of a directly social context;2 Dana Renga has more recently posed the very valuable question of whether trauma can even exist in this area:
Trauma formation […] is contextual and involves a process, it is not ‘a thing in itself.’ In other words, the originary event itself does not produce the traumatic effect, but the memory of it and its acting out, as Cathy Caruth points out in her discussion of trauma, memory and survival: ‘the fact that, for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis.’ Thus, reacting to, working through, moving on or surviving makes the event implicitly traumatic. Paradoxically then, one must return to the past in order to leave it behind, which is particularly challenging in the case of the Mafia, as it remains, as of yet, without a conclusion.3
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1 Cf. Alan O’Leary, Tragedia all'italiana: Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970-2010 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011); Elena Caoduro has presented provocative work on this topic, for instance in the paper ‘The Canonization of an Inconvenient Memory’, presented at the ‘A New Italian Political Cinema?’ workshop, London, 27 November 2010. Information available online: http://soton.academia.edu/ElenaCaoduro/Talks/29741/The_canonisation_of_an_inconvenient_memo ry_the_anni_di_piombo_in_recent_cinematic_representations [accessed 3 November 2011].
2 Fabio Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious (Bristol: Intellect, 2006), p. 186.
3 Dana Renga, Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millenium (Toronto: Toronto University Press, forthcoming).
187 The absence of a ‘conclusion’ of the mafia, thus preventing its conception as a past event, makes it difficult to phrase it within typical models of trauma that then are worked through, or otherwise trigger psychological problems. This ‘historical lacuna’ certainly complicates comparisons with the terrorism films for these motives: organized crime cinema cannot be read as functioning in the same way in the post-traumatic process within a cultural memory.
However, in attempting to explain the very specific and rigid critical response to organized crime cinema in Italy – that which applies a polarizing, value-based conception of the films as either engaged or a ‘polpettone’ – then it becomes immediately clear that this is triggered by the pressure to take the task of representation seriously and respectfully. This drive is undoubtedly linked to the constant renewal of the trauma inflicted by the organized crime on Italian society: those films which do not present a serious or respectful enough image are assumed to be offensive to the victims of the trauma.4 A split thus emerges between the original traumatic event and its post-traumatic representation, yet the two evidently cannot be entirely dislocated.
Tracing engaged representations of the mafia that take account of this trauma thus requires a theoretical shift. The critical tendency to polarize organized crime films can be read as what Leo Bersani terms the ‘culture of redemption’, whereby we seek somehow to justify or improve negative aspects of history: ‘a crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience’.5 Adopting Bersani’s theory, Adam Lowenstein applies it to film studies in order to ‘shift !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4 An example is the recent case of Vallanzasca: gli angeli del male (Michele Placido, 2011), which was criticized for being insensitive to the families of the murdered police officers at the Strage di Dalmine. I return to this case below, in the chapter to follow.
188 cinema’s relation to history from compensation to confrontation’. This allows him to alter the significance of the relationship between text and trauma:
Rather than offering reassuring displays of artistic ‘meaning’ validated as ‘productive’ in the face of historical trauma, [certain films] demand that we acknowledge how these impulses to make productive meaning from trauma often coincide with wishes to divorce ourselves from any real implication within it. In short, these films invite us to recognize our connection to historical trauma across the axes of text, context, and spectatorship.6
In the following paragraphs, I intend to make the same theoretical shift. I seek to go beyond the common critiques of the Italian organized crime film in terms of its impegno, assuming them to be ‘redemptive’ in the same way. The work undertaken in the previous chapter contributes to this already, where genre cinema self- consciously has not the same aims of being socially ‘productive’ (and it is significant here that Bersani views ‘redemptive culture’ as ‘a more or less explicit dogma of modern high culture’ that ‘persists in our own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism’).7 I argue below that taking Italian organized crime films as ‘confrontation’ of the trauma of organized crime, rather than ‘compensation’, facilitates this link between social history and cultural representation. My argument will furthermore implicitly promote a reading of individual lines or fragments of trauma that can be related to specific historical events, such as the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, that trigger specific threads of cultural response (the turn to images of the anti-mafia magistrate that I traced in the introduction is an example of this).
As will become clear, in fact, I take 1992 as a particularly significant historical event, and the confrontation of these murders in particular has become centralized within the representation of the mafia-as-trauma. This chapter thus enacts a notable !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6 Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 8-9.
189 shift, away from the agenda of impegno that I took as foundational in the cinema, to predominantly contemporary films. The two decades that have followed 1992 will remain the focus for the remainder of this thesis. My aim, in doing so, is to illustrate that in the wake of these killings the approach to representation of the mafia has, to some extent, doubled back on itself. Thus, while the 1990s mark a historical moment at which the fragmentation of impegno is well underway, and the new codes of ‘post-hegemonic impegno’ must be employed in order to understand how the engaged text works today, I argue that the latter constitutes only a part of the full story in relation to mafia images. The weight and importance of the traumatic event of 1992 can be interpreted as pivotal in organized crime cinema as the marker of a return to the foundational codes of impegno: from this period, as I have mentioned above, the polarizing response to the mafia film returns, becomes re-enforced, and moreover prioritizes a strictly moral ideological code and a strictly ‘realist’ aesthetic code.
The chapter’s structure aims to construct prudently this argument. I will begin with the events of 1992, then turning to two films released in the wake of the bombings (Giovanni Falcone, Giuseppe Ferrara, 1993) and Il giudice ragazzino (Alessandro di Robilant, 1994) in order to trace out the ‘confrontation’ of the events via a vocabulary of trauma. This will be centred on a sketching out of the ‘compulsion to repeat’ an instance of brutal realism, such as the assassination sequence; I will focus too on how the viewer function is engaged through melodramatic sequences which bracket the above, and foreground empathetic responses. The chapter then attempts to theorize the return to this aesthetic code through its phrasing as ‘traumatic realism’, borrowing the terminology of Michael
190 Rothberg.8 Rothberg’s suggestion that a historical trauma (such as the Holocaust) will trigger a shift in aesthetic codes (as either realist or anti-realist) will prove to be pointedly compatible with the mafia case.
Returning to the questions raised at the conclusion of the previous chapter, this discussion will serve to interrogate the formation of a specific ‘horizon of expectation’ that relates to the contemporary impegnato mafia film. By assuming that the trauma of the mafia can affect the construction of theoretically anachronistic, realist texts, in the following section I will pose the question of whether a horizon of expectation can be forged according to the same terms. From the overlap which would emerge between the two, which could be read in terms of a ‘dominant’ code, following Stuart Hall, I will pose the possible interpretative category of ‘performative realism’. Following the work carried out above, I will continue to presume that realism in these texts is formal, indeed staged. Here I extend this argument by suggesting that the realist mode ultimately becomes performed, following J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity, in that it not only describes that reality but moreover invokes it. In order to illustrate, however, that the representation of the mafia is essentially fragmentary and that no dogmatic ‘guidelines’ exist, I will then compare the performances of realism with alternative cases of recent films that make no such claims to historical truth, rather depicting history in a manner that foregrounds its unavoidable fictionality.
A final point of recognition that needs to be made is that, in shifting directly to the 1990s, I have generally omitted a decade of film history. Since the 1980s illustrate the process of fragmentation of impegno that I have signalled in the previous two chapters, that is, where the dogma of realism and Marxism begin to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
191 disintegrate, this has been an unfortunate consequence of my space limitations. It is nevertheless vital to recall that, as mentioned in the introduction, this marked a period in film history at which the boundaries between genre film and the engaged film ultimately did become more blurred than ever before – and images such as Mi manda picone (Nanni Loy, 1984) and La piovra are the strongest evidence of this; though the traumatic events of 1992 will stand to rupture this connection indefinitely.
i. The Compulsion to Repeat
Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and three bodyguards (Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro and Vito Schifani) were killed on 23 May 1992, by a bomb planted under the A29 motorway at Capaci by the mafia. Borsellino was assassinated less than two months later, on 19 July 1992, by a bomb planted in a car outside the house of his mother, in Via D’Amelio, also ending the lives of his escort (Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina and Claudio Traina). Together these two assassinations caught and froze the attention of the Italian people and media like no mafia killing had previously: ‘The Capaci bomb brought Italy to a standstill’, writes Dickie; ‘Most people remember exactly where they were when they heard the news, and in its aftermath several public figures declared themselves ashamed to be Italian’.9 Despite the relatively small number of casualties, and the history of mafia assassinations both recently (Salvo Lima’s death occurred two months before Falcone’s), and more historically, of men in similar positions to these judges (Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, 3 September 1982), the shock
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9 John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 14.
192 of this specific event has garnered comparisons to the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001 and in Madrid on 11 March 2004.10 These comparisons, and the forging of a ‘flashbulb memory’,11 evidently signal the particular and greater significance of this event within the national memory.
The attacks resonated so profoundly in Italy because of the powerful symbolic images of the two men and of the mafia: ‘[in] murdering Falcone, the Sicilian mafia rid itself of its most dangerous enemy, the symbol of the fight against it’.12 The public image of the judges built on their presumed patriotic devotion and utterly committed, methodical approach to breaking the mafia, and this emerged publicly in particular thanks to their unprecedented success at the Maxi trials in the late 1980s. Puccio-Den speculates that the heroic status of the martyred civil servant was quickly applied to these men (beginning with Dalla Chiesa) since Italy, being relatively young and in light of the extreme and suppressive politics of the ventennio and the early years of the First Republic, lacked national heroes.13 Not only were the stragi a symbolic defeat of the heroes, but they were a dramatic, physical eradication of the men (through explosions) that, to the public, ‘seemed an assertion of total invincibility’ of the mafia. Stille continues:
The mafia was showing that it was prepared to kill anyone – no matter how important or well protected – that the state might send up against it. By killing Falcone in Palermo and not in Rome, where Falcone worked during the last years of his life, Cosa Nostra declared that it and no-one else was in charge in Sicily. […] By blowing up an entire, bullet-proof motorcade on one of the most heavily travelled stretches of highway in Sicily, the mafia made a spectacular demonstration of its complete control of its territory.14
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10 Deborah Puccio-Den, ‘“Difficult Remembrance”: Memorializing Mafia Victims in Palermo’, in Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, ed. by Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), pp. 51-70 (p. 54).
11 Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 53-54. 12 Dickie, p. 14.
13 Puccio-Den, p. 57.
14 Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (London: Vintage, 1996),p. 7.
193 Thanks to the dramatic, almost cinematic nature of the explosions and their staging, these assassinations constituted a quasi-mythological spectacle, whereby Borsellino and Falcone were configured as heroes defeated in a land dominated by the invincible mafia. The event was then projected further and more quickly than any previous mafia killings, thanks to the present mass-media frameworks, thus triggering the flashbulb effect within a small period of time and for a vast audience. It is the universality, moreover, of the shared emotional response which allow us to articulate the events in terms of trauma, affecting a much wider public since the ‘mafia was showing that it was prepared to kill anyone’.15
Re-phrasing the events in terms of a traumatic event necessitates their framing within a historical progression; and focusing on the immediate emotional reactions engendered in the flashbulb effect is useful where it points us towards the model of ‘confrontation’ over ‘compensation’. Citing Freud, Leys offers a fruitful preliminary outline of progressive trauma/post-trauma:
It was not the experience itself which acted traumatically, but its delayed revival as memory […]. More specifically, according to the temporal logic of what Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, or ‘deferred action,’ trauma was constituted by a relationship between two events or experiences – a first event that was not necessarily traumatic because it came too early in the child’s development to be understood and assimilated, and a second event that also was not inherently traumatic but that triggered a memory of the first event that only then was given traumatic meaning and hence repressed.16
Locating the stragi within a process of trauma thus requires a more detailed picture: a diachronic framing of original event and Nachträglichkeit, the two ‘events or experiences’; and a clarification of the figure of the ‘child’ for whom this psychological progression occurs, since this cannot be read as an individual or personal process. Dana Renga, following the theoretical work of Kai Erikson, has suggested that key to reading the traumatic process on a collective level is the notion !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15 Stille, p. 7.
194 of community: ‘collective trauma is distinct as it entails a complete alteration of communal identity, and of bonds between members thereof’.17 As the descriptions cited above demonstrate, by rupturing the symbolism of the fight against the mafia, and moreover individuating the population of Italy by illustrating, in effect, that nobody is safe, the attacks of 1992 can be taken as a national-collective trauma. This will be my assumption throughout the following discussion, as, again following Renga, I take cinema, in light of its mass reception, as key to an investigation of the aftershocks of this communal trauma.
The films produced in the wake of these events are of use to signal more clearly the historical positioning of the event and its after-effects, though this requires a clarification of their presumed function. Freud suggests that a role of the psychoanalyst is to bring to light the trauma through the talking cure, to bring about its recognition within the patient, and thus to interrupt the latency period before further psychological damage or reverberations of the trauma occur.18 In other words, she must positively alter the Nachträglichkeit. As Mayne has illustrated,19 there is a tendency to read film as apparatus, capable of affecting the viewer: to do so in this case would be to suggest that the films serve the purpose of the psychoanalyst in Freud’s scenario. This is certainly possible, where, in this case, they assume typically a ‘memorializing’ function and thus appear to prevent any national-psychological repression.20 This reading, however, undoubtedly fits within the culture of redemption, in that it seeks to compensate for the traumatic event. To !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17 Renga, Unfinished Business, forthcoming.
18 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols, (London: Vintage Hogarth Press, 2001), III, pp. 191-221 (pp. 193-4). 19 Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 9; pp. 17-18.
20 Cf. Millicent Marcus, ‘In Memoriam: The Neorealist Legacy in Contemporary Sicilian Anti-Mafia Film’, in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, ed. by Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), pp. 290- 306.
195 eschew the dangers both of such ‘salvation’, and the subsequent dangers of presumptions of interpretation, the films must be read less as interventions than simply as a part of the Nachträglichkeit. Taking them as symptoms rather than